I often run into parents who ask me how to make their children learn English. And my answer usually begins with, “Why do you want to make your kids learn English?
Why don’t you, the parents, find out why your kids don’t want to learn English first?
I’d always thought only Asian parents get over-anxious about their children’s education, until I took a class called Grow Up in America when I studied in the US. To my great surprise, things that we Asian students can’t know better, such as cram school, after-school programs, special how-to-score-higher class that aims to improve a student’s test-taking skills and help him/her get into a better school—without actually improving how well s/he is learning, of course—are getting more and more popular in America.
So I guess that parents panic over children’s academic achievement is somewhat universal, not unique to China, Taiwan, or Japan.
And I don’t mean to say that it’s wrong to “push” your kids; a certain level of pressure indeed can enable one, kids or adults alike, to perform better. So the real question a parent should ask is: When to push? How to push?
This is what I heard this afternoon. A mother in our neighborhood complained about her son, who is in 10th grade now. He said to her, “I just don’t want to study English, not at all!” And she said, “I’ll buy whatever books your need, but you MUST study English.” And I also happened to know that this kid has been getting really poor marks on his English tests, something like 8 or 9, on a 100-point scale.
Of course, what this mother is doing would never work, because her son just hates the subject, and she keeps trying to make him do something that simply disgusts him.
Think of one thing that can really irritate you. Now, imagine someone forces you to do it. How would you feel?
The real problem does NOT lie in “how to make him do it.”
Why does he not want to do it?
Is he afraid of English? (Maybe he’s been punished really badly for getting bad grades…)
Is he frustrated when he studies English? (Perhaps he needs someone to help him with English phonetics but he’s too shy to ask…)
Is he not understanding what the teacher says in class? (Some teachers simply do a poor job, it’s just that nobody ever has a chance to find out, even the teacher him/herself)
Those are the real problems. If you never identify the real problems in the first place, how can you expect to solve them?
But I’ve seen way too many parents like that, and I am experienced enough (don’t even ask why) to know it would take ages to convince those parents that what they’re doing, though worthy of sympathy, are useless.
May God be with you, poor kid.
